Why do I write books? Why do I think? Why should I be passionate? Because things could be different, they could be made better.

Never paint epic canvases during the revolution, because the revolutionaries will tear them apart.

We live in a globalising world. That means that all of us, consciously or not, depend on each other. Whatever we do or refrain from doing affects the lives of people who live in places we'll never visit.

The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of.

Now people are worried not about the prospects of buying new things, but about how to pay for the things they bought yesterday, a year ago or years before. It is, as Americans like to say, "a wholly different kind of ball-game".

All the skills which I have acquired during my sociological life allow me to diagnose and explain what is going on, but not to predict what will happen.

I am not a prophet; I cannot predict what will happen.